And blogging about it. Check it out at CRPGAddict.blogspot.com. He’s basing this off wikipedia’s list of RPGs, his Google spreadsheet can be found here. Also, he seems committed, looks like he’s currently around 1990, tackling things like Dungeon of Nadrod and Magic Candle (huh?). This is truly a life’s work if ever there was such a thing.

I’ve been wanting to play indie game Volume for a while, and now that it’s released on the Vita, I’m going to do just that. Volume is a stealth game inspired by MGS. It also has a UGC component. It’s received solid reviews, and it’s a cross buy, AND your purchase will eventually include a Volume Playstation VR expansion pack. That’s a lot of Volume for 20 bucks.

A recent teardown of the Vita discovered that the CPU is actually an underclocked quad-core ARM Cortex A9 running at 333MHz. This has been a much discussed topic for years, so, uh, mystery solved I guess. In comparison, the new New 3DS doubled their cores (2 to 4) to match the Vita, and is rumored to run at a whopping 800MHz, so it blows away the Vita. So New 3DS is totally >>>>> than Vita!!1!1! Or not, because according to Wikipedia, it’s still running at the same 268MHz clock speed, which would make sense for backward compatibility purposes.

I could see this going two directions. Either gaming hardware companies will pivot to releasing phone specific gaming hardware (think Sony PhoneStation; a portable controller that works with your phone). Or, maybe the hardware just gets so cheap and ubiquitous that releasing a new portable console is feasible. Who knows.

What I do know is that both devices, the Vita and the New 3DS, have some coolgames. And that’s all that really matters.

In case you hadn’t found this out yet, you can command your horse “buddy” to defecate on command (natch’). What you might not have known, however, is that this particular horse poo will make vehicles spin out of control when contacted (double natch’). This can be highly useful, especially on Mission 09.

I recently had a kid. Scratch that. I didn’t have the kid, my wife had the kid. And when I write “had the kid” I really mean she explored the barriers of human pain to push an eight pound living, breathing human being out of her lithe female shape. Much respect.

Anyhow, in my time off, and in between the many distracting baby activities (gawd baby, can’t you see I’m trying to finish off this boss battle?), I’ve been giving Sony’s PS Now service on my Vita a tryout.

In short: I’m impressed. The quality is fantastic. Latency doesn’t seem to be an issue at all—honestly, I haven’t even been able to notice it (maybe if I was playing an intense shooter?). I’ve tried several games (notably Enslaved and X-Com) and they all play flawlessly on my Vita. My only complaint is the Vita’s lack of R2/L2; but Sony has a few options for mapping these to the front touch-screen or back-touch pad. Both work, but neither are ideal. Still, overall, the whole experience is very solid. My Vita’s library just exploded exponentially.

This has led me to believe the future of gaming is in the cloud. Why wouldn’t it be? From a customer perspective, I don’t need to buy new hardware every few years, I don’t need to worry about hardware breaking, bug fixes come immediately, and even performance improvements roll out as I play.

From a business perspective it makes a lot of sense too. Specifically, the subscription model allows for predictable revenues. Risk is reduced from hardware returns and poor releases. Releases cycles can be faster (or sort of nonexistent). Bugs are fixed faster. Support costs should drastically reduce.

Prediction one: five years from now a significant portion (let us say… 25%) of non-casual (eg, non-app) gaming will be cloud based.

Prediction two: Sony will release a mobile controller for iPhone/Android that will play PS Now games through an app within 18 months. The controller will cost $49 (20% profit margin, at least), and will be the only way to use the app. It will be similar to the DS4, except the phone will replace the touch-pad. This is Sony’s bet on mobile gaming.

Five years from now, this shit will be ubiquitous and none of this will matter. That said, I seriously doubt the Oculus founder’s street smarts. Google should probably tamper him down a bit and let him just focus on releasing a rad product (instead of trying to market it).